BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

The primary use case was basic ITIL/ITSM.

It replaced an older system, called ManageNow. It had no major impact on the way we operated. We more or less continued, we had a well-performing organization, so it really didn't change much. Everything we had in ManageNow, we had in BMC Remedy, including basic incident management, event management, based on monitors spread around our environment.

It was a full-featured product. Based on my experience where I was responsible for Remedy, and for a later project where I worked on a very sophisticated implementation of BMC Remedy, it is full-featured and could do almost anything that you can think of in the ITIL portfolio.

BMC Remedy has more features now than I know about and have used, so it would be presumptuous for me to try to suggest improvements for a future release.

What I do find is that, compared to ServiceNow, BMC Remedy is somewhat "closed." I can go to the ServiceNow website and learn everything there is to know about the product, and training is available. That really wasn't available with BMC Remedy.

However, if I'm working with a client who wants to expand and move into other areas - they want to expand their workflow and other parts of the organization, they want to do some work with project management, they want to do some work with HR - I'm not sure that BMC Remedy is doing that. And it's because of their platform. Any software has a lifecycle. To me, BMC is a dated architecture. I wish them well but I don't see how they're going to keep going, long-term, without a total rewrite and coming out with a new system.

BMC Remedy is good. It's solid. I don't remember ever having any stability problems with it.

I didn't see any limits. I worked with one client who had, to me, what seemed like a lot of servers. They had some 25,000 servers. They had a lot of BMC workflows. They had a lot of users on the system. I never really got a full feel for how many, based on what I was doing, but I saw no scalability issues. ServiceNow and BMC Remedy scale about equally.

There were times when we needed to talk with BMC service support, and we got good response. It was something that we paid for, but we got good response.

The old system was at the end of its lifecycle, it was being phased out. The name of it was ManageNow, and I don't know that it exists anymore. It was very old and BMC Remedy was a step up, in the right direction, to a modern system.

When selecting a vendor it depends on the client. In my case, I was selecting for a client and BMC Remedy was the best available at the time. We did an evaluation of all the vendors, and BMC Remedy was the best. That was eight years ago.

Initial setup was like any other similar implementation. There are certain things that you have to do, tables that you have to build, configurations that you have to work with. There are a few modifications that you have to make so that it fits into your environment. We tried to stay as close as we could to the out-of-the-box solution. So it was fairly straightforward.

There are portions of BMC Remedy that are proprietary. One of those was attachments. If I attached an image, if I attached a project plan, if I attached a screen print, getting those out was very difficult when we moved servers to ServiceNow. So if you're not planning on moving, it's not an issue. It's when you move it the issue.

ServiceNow is expanding. If I were just choosing an ITSM system right now, it would be hard to choose, if you ignored the underlying platform. BMC Remedy is very old. It has a very old infrastructure. So if I ignored that, and the "openness" issue, it would be very hard to choose between BMC and Service Now.

I would rate at nine out of 10. It did what we wanted it to do. We had some issues, but we caused those issues by the way we implemented it. I found that BMC training and BMC availability for learning how the system worked and for answering questions - if it wasn't in their manual, it was very difficult to get that information. You had to pay, it wasn't open. It was a "closed" environment. If it had been much more open, so I could get into understanding everything, that would have been better.

In terms of advice, if you're working for a large company on an ITSM solution, where you're talking about incidents, problems, change, knowledge, there are three, maybe four vendors. I would say look at those very hard, learn what you can, and make the best decision for your organization. It's a limited market.

The solution supports our supporting processes. My responsibilities include reporting on the services we offer to end-users, primarily through channels like email. I focus on coordinating arrangements for the services we provide.

The valuable feature for me is that it's a tool that allows me to track processes right from the initial user request. It helps in updating the solution throughout the workflow. I use it to gather information about the people involved, track time, and more.

Working with numerous processes can be complex, and the processes are not always transparent in the solution. At times, users may not be aware of the meaning behind various processes when receiving certain information. The most frequently requested change for the solution is integrating the latest technology to facilitate interactive resolution.

I have been using the solution for the past 20 years.

The solution is stable. I have several servers working together in a cluster.

The solution is scalable.

We haven't needed customer support extensively. However, we did encounter some delays, waiting for several hours to receive a satisfactory answer. Fortunately, there have been no issues with the technical components.

I have worked with SentinelOne and ServiceNow.

The solution is best-suited for medium-sized companies. I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The BMC Helix ITSM can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

We use BMC Helix ITSM in the financial sector.

The most valuable features of BMC Helix ITSM are the ease to use and integration.

BMC Helix ITSM should improve its price.

I have been using BMC Helix ITSM for a couple of years.

BMC Helix ITSM is a stable solution.

We have a lot of clients using BMC Helix ITSM.

The initial installation of BMC Helix ITSM is fine.

I have a team that does the implementation of BMC Helix ITSM.

The price of BMC Helix ITSM could improve their price.

I would recommend BMC Helix ITSM to others.

I rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of ten.

It's a help desk software. It is an ITSM system. We are an MSP. We use it in-house and then we use it for a bunch of our other customers.

It's a stable, reliable product.

The solution can scale and expand well.

It's one of the top solutions on the market for ITSM capabilities. 

We used to use it and we don't want to use it anymore. We're actually now replacing it.

The interface isn't that great. Also, it just doesn't integrate with as many systems as ServiceNow.

The initial setup is complex. 

I've been using the solution for 11 years or so. 

The stability is very, very good. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of reliability. It doesn't crash or lag on us. There aren't bugs or glitches. 

It is highly scalable. We have lots of users. We've never had a problem expanding it. It's not a problem.

Their support is not really good yet. Due to our scale, when we work with their support, it's not very good.

Neutral

We are actually on the way to phasing this solution out. We are replacing it with ServiceNow. ServiceNow integrates with more solutions. 

The initial setup is pretty complex. 

We had the competency to handle the setup in-house. 

The cost is high and going up. Part of the reason why we're changing products is that the pricing actually went up recently by a lot.

We're an MSP. We resell it for BMC amongst other things.

This solution is a SaaS, a Software as a Service, solution. 

It's probably the second-best solution out there. It's just that, as an MSP, we just need to work with a bunch of other toolsets. When that happens, then you run into more support issues and run into more integration issues. That said, I would still say it's the second-best ITSM solution out there.

I'd rate the solution five out of ten. 

This tool is used for ticketing purposes, to track down daily issues and requests as part of business requirements.

It includes ITIL practices such as incident management, problem management, change management, asset management, and configuration management. We are able to link tickets to one another.

It is used to create, modify, update, and resolve tickets. Parent/child tickets are possible to create. It can also create problem tickets and change requests. It will easily calculate SLAs and can create and customize reports as per user requirement. 

This product has helped us to maintain our OLAs (Organisation level Agreements) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) by tracking incidents, requests, problem records, and change requests, all in the form of tickets.

We can easily check the progress of these tickets and follow up with the respective teams.

It provides us the facility to maintain a KEDB (Knowledge database), which is indeed very beneficial for day to day activities.

It can easily add notes to every ticket with the status update.

For us, this tool is essential for ticketing purposes.

The most valuable feature is the linking of parent and child tickets. When there are major issues, through the help desk, multiple tickets are raised for the same issue. This allows us to segregate it by parent or child tickets and link the child tickets to the parent.

It's easy to calculate the SLA as it provides the timing as to when the ticket was raised, and the clock automatically stops when the ticket is on pending status. Thus, at the time of resolution, it provides the SLA, whether the ticket met the SLA or not.

To raise any ticket, there are too many fields to be filled and it makes generating tickets very time-consuming. Some fields should take data automatically; for example, ticket routing to the teams after entering the team's respective CI (Configuration Item). This will save time and creating tickets would be faster. 

The GUI looks a bit complex and can be much better.

When generating reports, there are limited options to customize as per user requirement. It is in need of better customization so that these requirements can be satisfied.

We have been using BMC Helix ITSM for six years.

• CMDB is very useful and it is used to manage client and non-client CI
• Freedom to use your ow way to integrate other systems with BMC Remedy
• Not too difficult to customize workflows

Using Service Request Management creates a Change Request and then sends, via a web service, a request to start a job on VMware to automatically create a server. When the job is finished and server is created it send back the name of the server back to remedy and automatically creates the CI in CMDB and create relationships. In this way we created an automatically way of requesting a server.

In 8.1.02 the Atrium core in the Midtier should be improved. It is using flex technology which is not so reliable. I think in v9 it was changed the technology.

I have been using this product for almost eight years.

There were no major issues with the deployment.

There have been no major issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

The first level is not so skilled . If you manage to go to second level they are good.

There was no previous solution in place.

It was a complex one, because our company was bought by another one and both companies had different versions of remedy installed which needed to be unified. The complexity was from the level of customizations each instance of Remedy needed.

We did it via a vendor. It would be good to create a knowledge in hour which knowledge should be transferred from the vendor side.

I'm not involved in this area.

The BMC Remedy products are reliable and cover all the ITIL processes. An advice would be to try to keep as low as possible the level of customizations.

We use Helix to manage incidents and requests. 

The user experience could be better. 

I have used Helix for one year.

Helix is stable.

Helix is scalable.

Setting up Helix is complex, and it takes about a day to deploy. 

This is an IT Service Management tool for incident management. 

I use this product as an end-user and not an administrator. This is not a product that I use extensively. We primarily use it for incident tracking and service request tracking.

The interface is nice and it's simple to use.

It provides a good user experience.

Functionality-wise, it falls short of our expectations. This could be the way we have it deployed. Perhaps, the functionalities have not been enabled 100% in our organization. There could be some additional features that our enterprise is not aware of, yet is available.

There is a text editor that we use to enter our incident description or service request description, and it should be richer in terms of features. For example, it would be helpful if we had more formatting options.

We have not faced too many issues with stability. It's fairly okay.

This product is used enterprise-wide, with between 600 and 800 users.

Our administration teams are the ones that have contact with technical support. As such, I have not had any experience with them.

Prior to using BMC Helix, we used CA Service Desk.

I prefer using BMC.

We used a system integrator for the deployment.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.